


Becoming Safta

by JoniWritesStuff



Category: Hunters (TV 2020)
Genre: Childbirth, Death in Childbirth, Gen, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Premature Infant, Revenge, Teen Pregnancy, medically fragile infant, ruth heidelbaum is a badass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:07:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24492505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoniWritesStuff/pseuds/JoniWritesStuff
Summary: It's 1958, and Ruth Heidelbaum makes a choice.
Relationships: Ruth Heidelbaum & Jonah Heidelbaum
Comments: 5
Kudos: 22





	Becoming Safta

**Author's Note:**

> So, here it is: the story that made me finally get on AO3 after something like fifteen years. FFN just doesn't have a fandom for Hunters, and AO3 clearly does. Also, I like the idea of being able to front load my tags - this is easily the darkest thing I've ever written, and I want to make that clear before you start reading. The idea for this story came from the fact that someone pointed out on IMDb that if you do the math, Jonah's mother couldn't have been any more than thirteen when she died giving birth to him, and that's absolutely horrifying. I don't know if the writers of the show intended that or it's an oversight, but this fic popped into my head pretty much fully formed and I had to go with it.

"You know, you have an intimate relationship with death. But know it not to be a curse but a blessing. One that will bring you closer to life."

-Meyer Offerman to Jonah Heidelbaum

**1958**

Walking home from the supermarket, Naomi was talking a mile a minute, skipping down the sidewalk, pigtails flying. Ruth didn't know then, but it was the last time she'd be happy for a very long while.

Naomi practiced piano while Ruth put the groceries away, and then the girl came into the kitchen. "I don't feel well, Mama," she said, one hand clutching at her belly.

"I will make some chicken soup," Ruth said with an indulgent smile. "Go lay down with the hot water bottle. Maybe it's your little visitor, huh?" Naomi, newly thirteen, had gotten her monthly once or twice but nothing for half a year. Ruth's had done the same at her age, thirty years before. It was annoying, but after a while her body had settled into a predictable rhythm - until, at least, starvation and fear had interrupted it.

Ruth moved around her little kitchen, chopping vegetables, shredding herbs, thinking about nothing in particular. Naomi had her radio on upstairs, and Ruth heard her singing along with that Elvis - "a dreamboat," Naomi would call the man, whatever that meant.

Then there was a scream.

Ruth dropped the knife and took the stairs two at a time - "What is it, my darling?" At first she saw only the blood, and thought Naomi was just upset about getting her period (all over the ballerina bedspread that she just _had_ to have when she turned twelve, but it's nothing a little club soda wouldn't take out). But she followed Naomi's shaking, pointing finger. "Something f- something _fell out of me_ ," the girl said, breath hitching.

"What do you mean, fell out? What does that mean?" Ruth muttered, but she looked. In a pool of blood, not looking like anything human or even anything alive. Covered with gore and not moving, small enough to fit in one of her hands. "Did you - Oh my god, Naomi, why didn't you tell me?" Not angry, but curious. "I would have - we would have -"

Naomi had gone quiet, and the blood stain on the sheets was spreading. Ruth grabbed her daughter by both shoulders, looked into her eyes. "Stay with me, darling," she said firmly. "I'm going to go call an ambulance. I'll be back in a minute. Just - please hold on."

It felt like the precious seconds took hours, down the stairs and into the kitchen, looking up the number with shaking hands. "My daughter has just - she's had a baby, there's blood everywhere, so much blood -"

"Ma'am?" the disembodied voice said on the other end. "I need you to calm down. Can you do that for me?"

Ruth closed her eyes and squeezed the receiver. "I'm calm. I am calm."

"You said she had a baby. Is it breathing?"

"I don't - I don't know. I didn't check."

"Okay ma'am? Here's what I need you to do." The voice told her that she needed to tie off the cord in two places - Ruth unlaced Naomi's Buster Browns, lined up neatly by the door, slipped her kitchen shears into the pocket of her apron. Jerked open the drawer in the kitchen for a clean dish towel. It took too long, too many seconds away from her Naomi, her baby.

Back upstairs, the girl didn't look good. She had gone sort of grayish, slumped down against the headboard. The pool of blood covered most of the twin sized bed, at that point. Ruth hated to tear her attention away from her child for even a moment longer, but she snatched up the thing - the _baby_ \- and rubbed it all over with a towel, just like the voice on the phone had told her to do. She didn't take any longer than that, not sparing another second to see if it was a boy or a girl or even alive. Ruth needed both of her hands free to take care of Naomi, so without even thinking about it she tucked the tiny bundle into the front of her own blouse.

"Naomi? Naomi darling, please look at your mama."

"I didn't know, mama," Naomi said, so faint Ruth could barely hear her. "I promise. Please don't be angry."

"I know," Ruth said, starting to cry. "I know." She understood it all in a flash, just then - someone had _done this_ to her baby, and she was going to find him and make him pay. "Can you tell me who - who would -"

But by then Naomi's eyes had sunk closed. A shudder ran over the girl's body, and then a _torrent_ of blood came out of her, and even after years in the camp Ruth was horrified. She gathered up the end of the bedding that wasn't already saturated, and pressed it as hard as she could against her girl's body. Downstairs she heard banging on the front door, and she shouted, over her own terror and her girl's unnatural silence. "We're up here! Please, please hurry!"

A tinkle and shower of glass as the medics smashed their way in, and then two men in white pulled Ruth's arms away. "Ma'am, we need to look at her," one of them said. Naomi's eyes had opened again, but they were staring at the ceiling, unseeing. "Ma'am, you need to give us space."

Things moved quickly, then, as they manhandled Ruth's precious baby onto a stretcher and into the wailing ambulance. Ruth followed close on their heels, climbing into the back of the vehicle without even asking. The siren was so loud, she didn't even know how she heard it, later. But there was the tiniest noise, like the bleating of a lamb, that came from the bundle tucked into her chest. One of the medics held out his hands, and Ruth handed the thing over, without a word.

"Oh my god," the other one said, glancing over his shoulder but not taking his hands off Naomi. "Is it alive?"

The first medic's words were burned into Ruth's memory for every day of the next nineteen years that she would live. "Yes. Yes, he is."

* * *

"Mrs. Heidelbaum?" Ruth jerked her head up, her prayer interrupted, and found herself looking at the emergency room doctor. He didn't have to say a word. She knew.

"I just…" She couldn't find her purse, and she tried to pull her sweater over the bloodstains on her shirt. "I just want to see her. Can I see her before…"

The doctor nodded gravely, and steered her down the hall by her elbow. "It was a hemorrhage," he said. "We took her womb, but she bled out anyway. I'm so sorry."

Naomi's body - her young body, so small on that cold sterile table - was covered with a sheet but her face was serene. She looked like an angel. "Is there any way to know…" Ruth started. "How can I know who did this to her."

"You didn't know she was pregnant."

"No." Ruth's hands busied themselves, smoothing out the girl's hair, wiping away a spot of blood on her chin. "She didn't look it." The girl's school uniforms had gotten a little tight lately, but again, Ruth thought this was normal. Ruth herself had gotten pudgy right before her body developed - unlike lucky Chava, who had sailed gracefully from childhood to womanhood and skipped the awkward phase in between.

"They often don't, at this age," the doctor said. "The baby is only - he's a hair over two pounds. Between six and seven months' gestation."

Ruth nodded. "She said it fell out of her. I don't think she even pushed."

"Does that help you, at all? Who was she seeing, seven months ago?"

Ruth, holding her baby's face in her two hands, shrugged her shoulders. "I don't understand it," she said. "How could I not know?"

"Please," the doctor said, "you must not blame yourself. She would have gone to great lengths to hide it from you."

"I don't think she knew."

"Did you never tell her? Did she not know where babies come from?"

"No, it's not that," Ruth argued. Her baby, her Naomi. The last and only living thing linking her to her beloved Meyer. "She knew. But she's never even had a boyfriend."

* * *

A week after her baby was lowered into the ground, Ruth went to the police. They were, to put it mildly, not helpful.

"Teenagers have sex," Officer Davis said with a shrug. " _People_ have sex. What are you gonna do? It's not a crime."

"I know that. I'm not stupid." Ruth had lain with Meyer without the benefit of matrimony, all those years ago in the DP camp - but she'd been a grown woman, thirty years old. Not a child. "But whoever did this to her, he _killed_ her. Surely the law cares about that."

"Yes, and I'm sorry about that, Mrs. Heidelbaum -" he mangled the pronunciation of her last name - "but even if you knew who knocked her up, there's no law against it. Boys will be boys, and all that."

"You don't understand. She went to school, she went to her piano lessons, she came home. She didn't even go to the movies without me. She was a good girl."

"They're all good girls," the cop said, already losing interest in the conversation. "And yet, here we are."

Then something he had said struck Ruth with a fresh wave of horror. "And what if it wasn't a boy?" she said. "What if it was a man, a grown man?"

"Well, then he'd have to face charges for statutory," Officer Davis conceded. "But only if you can prove it. And you'll never be able to prove it."

* * *

Two weeks after that, Ruth was summoned to the hospital to meet with a baby-faced social worker, sweating in his shirtsleeves in a windowless office. "Nice to meet you, Mr. Price," Ruth said, shaking his hand over a desk teetering with paperwork.

"Please, call me Douglas."

"All right, Douglas. What do you need from me?"

He laid it out for her in a few sentences, unflinching. The baby, if it survived - and there was maybe a thirty percent chance of that happening - would need to be placed in a home for abandoned infants as soon as the hospital could release him. The sooner, the better if they wanted to have any chance of getting him placed in a nice family, because the older those babies got, the less the demand. With this baby being premature, it could buy them a little time, they could fudge the dates on the birth certificate, but Ruth would need to sign over her rights as soon as possible. If not today, then this week.

Ruth sat with her purse on her lap and watched the electric clock count off a full minute. "I didn't want this," she said. "I never wanted things to end up like this."

The social worker, though clearly overworked, was sympathetic. "I know. No one does."

"And what if I don't sign?"

Douglas sighed. "Sometimes, when the family doesn't want to - they keep it, and raise it as a younger sibling. Tell your friends you had a change of life baby."

"Well, that's no good. My husband died five years ago."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Can I ask one thing?" Ruth said. "I just want him to go to a nice Jewish family. I want him to know - to know who he is."

"I'm afraid that won't be possible, Mrs. Heidelbaum." He put a stack of papers into a file folder. "I can hold off a little longer, if you'd like some time to think. And I really am very sorry for your loss."

"Thank you. I appreciate that."

"Mrs. Heidelbaum?" Douglas said as Ruth prepared to leave. "Have you seen him yet?"

"Not since the day - no."

Douglas nodded. "That's good. Keep it that way. Don't make it any harder."

"Thank you."

* * *

It was Ruth Heidelbaum's perverse streak that had her riding the elevator from the basement office up to the seventh floor, up to the double doors marked 'Premature Infant Nursery.' It only took a few minutes to explain who she was and what she was doing there, to scrub up with surgical soap and be tied into a sterile gown and mask. Then a similarly clad nurse led her to the end of the row of incubators. "Here he is," the nurse said gently.

Ruth wasn't sure what she was expecting to see, but the sight stunned her none the less. A tiny, ugly, wrinkled thing, looking more like a walnut than a human being. Barely visible under a tangle of tubes and wires, a large white bandage covering its eyes. Naomi had been a fat, dimpled baby, nothing like this sad fragile creature lying like a museum exhibit in a Plexiglass box. It took a while for Ruth to find her voice. "How… how is he?"

The nurse rattled off some unintelligible statistics about kidney function, blood count, oxygen saturation. "Bottom line," she concluded, "he's not doing that great."

Ruth nodded. "The man downstairs, he said - he said thirty percent." Tears started to gather in her eyes. She wanted to cry, she wanted to scream, at how unfair it all was. Somehow the numbers, stark and cruel, just drove that home. "Is that true?"

"I don't gamble, but I'd bet on this one." Ruth couldn't be sure but suspected the nurse was smiling behind her mask. "Look at him. He's a fighter."

She looked at him, wriggling his tiny arms and legs, like he was trying to tell her something. Then she looked down the row of incubators, and it struck her there was a difference. All the others were decorated with construction paper cutouts of rabbits and ducks, apparently stuck on by hopeful parents, crayon drawings maybe done by older siblings. This one bore no adornment other than an index card Scotch-taped crookedly on one end. 'Baby Boy Hidelbaum,' it said in scrawling print. They hadn't even spelled it right.

He deserved better than that. He deserved a name, at least.

"Can I come back and see him?" Ruth said tentatively. "Can I - will you tell me how he's doing?"

"Sure. Leave your phone number at the desk, we'll call you if there's any news."

"Yes, thank you." And then Ruth bent down and murmured something to the baby that the nurse didn't catch, but it sounded like Hebrew.

* * *

Ruth went to Mindy and Murray. She couldn't explain why, but she felt an overwhelming desire to tell them everything. Sitting with a cup of coffee on her knee she did just that, while the kids screamed and ran in circles around her. They had a matched set, two boys and two girls. It always made Ruth think of cutlery.

"Am I crazy?" Ruth finished. "To think of taking that baby home, and raising him."

"Crazy? No." There was a crash, and a howl, and Mindy's youngest - Amy, a curly-haired three-year-old, came sobbing into her mother's arms. "I hate to think of you alone in that house, Ruth, after everything you've been through. After the ghetto and the camps, after Meyer and Nathaniel, and now Naomi too. I think he would be a blessing to you."

"I think you're right."

"I lost a child too, you know," Mindy said over her youngest's wail. Not a trace of blood on the little girl; Ruth suspected she was playing it up for attention. "It's been fifteen years. And I have these little ones. You never get over it, of course, but it was so much less difficult once my arms had someone to hold again."

Ruth put out her own arms, painfully empty. "I don't even know if Jonah is going to live or die. He's so small, Mindy, like nothing you've ever seen before."

A smile broke over the other woman's face. "Do you realize what you just said?"

"I said I don't know if he's going to live, if he-"

"No," Mindy interrupted, beaming. "You said _Jonah_. You named him."

"Well, I couldn't think of him as 'it' or 'the baby' anymore. It didn't feel right."

"Jonah," Mindy repeated. "Jonah Heidelbaum."

"It was my father's name."

"It's a good name."

"He was a good man."

Mindy unceremoniously dumped Amy onto the floor. "Wait here. I have baby clothes for you."

* * *

It would have been nice if things became easier after that, but the little boy was not out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot. Ruth read every book she could find on premature babies, asked the nurses a thousand questions, and stopped returning Douglas' calls.

"He opened his eyes today, Mrs. Heidelbaum," one of the nurses told Ruth when Jonah was five weeks old.

"Oh, I brought - I brought this." Ruth pulled a photograph out of her purse, Naomi's eighth grade school portrait. "I thought he should see her. His mother."

"Oh look, he's awake," the nurse said. "I think he'd like to see you too."

Ruth squatted down and looked at him, making eye contact with her grandson for the first time. "Well, hello there, Jonah," she said. She looked back up at the nurse. "His eyes are blue."

"Yes."

"I didn't think they'd be so blue. Don't babies' eyes sometimes change color, after they're born?"

The nurse was taping the photograph to the side of the incubator, where Jonah could see it. "Sometimes they do," she agreed. "But in my experience, when they're clear and bright like that, they stay blue."

"Beautiful. He's beautiful."

"He certainly is."

* * *

It's the eyes that made her think.

Back at the start of eighth grade, Naomi couldn't shut up about her new science teacher. Young and cool, half the age of the crusty old geezers who filled the classrooms of her middle school. Blue eyes, just like Elvis, Mama. And Naomi, who had up to then been an unenthusiastic student at best, started staying after school to help set up the next day's experiments. Ruth had been so proud of her, taking an interest in her education at last, maybe she'd grow up to be a teacher or a scientist herself.

For the life of her, Ruth couldn't remember his name, but she could find it. The school would tell her. And then she remembered him after Naomi's funeral - "I'm so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Heidelbaum. She was such a bright girl, such a beautiful girl."

Ruth didn't even have to count the months backwards on her fingers. She _knew_.

* * *

"Right here, Mrs. Heidelbaum, just have a seat and we'll bring him to you." Ruth held out her arms, and suddenly Jonah was in them. "He's up to five pounds, he's doubled his birth weight which is a really good sign."

"Hello, Jonah, hello my little one," Ruth crooned. Jonah squawked, and started rooting around for a nipple. One of the nurses handed Ruth a bottle of formula, and the boy sucked greedily, making noises like a little piglet.

"He likes you," said the nurse who was straightening out Jonah's IV line.

"How can you tell?"

"I've been doing this a long time," she said, "and I can just tell."

"Well, I hope he likes me, I'm his safta."

"Safta?"

"Oh, it means grandmother."

The nurse gave Ruth a friendly pat on the shoulder. "Then I'm glad you're his safta."

Ruth looked down at her grandson. "I love you the most," she said softly, feeling her heart expand with the words. "And I'm going to make the world a better place for you."

* * *

Ruth found the name on Naomi's last report card. John Schroeder. He had given her an A plus in science with the comment "Star pupil!" It made Ruth's flesh crawl.

It didn't take her long to track him down. He wasn't hiding, didn't think he had any reason to hide. And he wasn't so brave that being tied up by a middle-aged woman half his size didn't reduce him to crying like a little bitch.

"Please," he begged, tears and snot ruining the movie-star good looks that had had Naomi so besotted with him. Naomi, and God knew how many other underage girls. He'd worked at three different schools in the last five years, and Ruth would bet her life that he'd left under a shroud of suspicion each time. "Please, I have a wife and kids."

"Kids?" Ruth spat. " _Kids_? You have a son. Do you even know his name?"

"I'm sorry, okay? I didn't know she was pregnant."

"Shut up." Ruth backhanded John Schroeder. What a stupid name. "You killed her. You killed my baby when you put that thing in her." She pointed the knife at his crotch, let the tip of it rest ever so slightly across the vertical seam in his pants.

"What do you want? You want m-m-money?"

"You don't have money," Ruth retorted. "You're a public school teacher making five thousand dollars a year. Mortgaged to the hilt, too." She pressed down on the knife handle, just a bit, just enough to let him know it was there. "No, I want something else from you."

"What do you want from me? Anything! Just please - please -"

Lightning-quick, Ruth moved the knife to his neck. "I'm giving you a choice."

"Are you going to -" The rest of his sentence was unintelligible.

"This is what you are going to do, John Schroeder. In the next twenty-four hours, you are going to tell your wife, your principal, and Officer Steven Davis of the New York City Police Department what you've done. You are going to quit your job, and burn your teaching license."

"And what am I supposed to do _then_?"

"Work as a longshoreman, I don't care. You are never, and I mean never, to be sniffing around little girls again. And don't think I won't know."

"You-you-you said I had a choice," John blubbered. "What's my other option?"

Ruth pointed the knife south again. "Then I do it for you. And I cut that thing off, too boot."

"Please don't - please don't -"

Ruth quickly and efficiently cut through the ropes holding his hands and feet, put the knife in her purse and snapped it shut. "Goodbye, John Schroeder."

* * *

Three weeks later, the NYPD fished a waterlogged corpse out of the East River, wearing a trench coat with the pockets full of rocks. The driver's license in the pocket bore the name John Schroeder. It was immediately ruled a suicide, and got a three-sentence writeup on one of the back pages of The Times.

Ruth missed seeing the news item. She didn't read the paper at all that day, because that was the day she brought Jonah home.

* * *

One day, Jonah came home from middle school to find Ruth at the kitchen table when she was supposed to be at work.

"What's going on?" he said, instantly concerned. "Are you sick? Are you all right?"

"No, no, I'm fine." Ruth waved a hand. "I just wanted to spend some time with my favorite grandson, is all. How does the Wonder Wheel sound?"

"It sounds great, safta, but I've got homework."

"Pfft. Let the homework go for one night. You've got straight A's anyway."

Jonah hung his backpack on its hook. If she hadn't been watching, he would have dumped it on the floor. "Can we get hot dogs?"

"Sure, we'll get hot dogs. And get the camera. I want to remember this day."

Later that night, well past his bedtime, a Jonah stuffed full of hot dogs and peanuts and cotton candy and Coke slung an arm around his grandmother. He was nearly as tall as her now; he would cross that mark in the next six months and just keep on growing. "You wanna tell me what this was about?"

"What, I can't spend a little time with you every now and again?"

"My birthday was last month. It's nowhere near Hanukkah. You're not - oh god, you're not dying, are you, safta?"

"No." She held his hand so they won't get separated boarding the subway. "Today is the day - you're the exact same age, to the day, as she was. Your mother died on this day, bringing you into the world."

Jonah looked down at the toes of his Chuck Taylors, then back up at her. "Don't you hate me?"

"Why would I hate you?"

"Because I killed her," he said in a very small voice. He'd thought it a thousand times, but never said it out loud. "I killed my mother." So like his mama, whose very last words on this earth had been an apology.

"You didn't kill her," Ruth said firmly. "And I never hated you, not for an instant. How could I? You are a blessing."

The subway swayed, and Jonah leaned into her. "I love you, safta."

"I love you, too, Jonah," she said. "I love you the most."


End file.
